Stylistic analysis of professional registers

a functional analysis of the language of politics

Analysing occupational varieties of English: it is not the words they need, but how to connect them to fulfil their roles

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) involves much more than specialist vocabulary. Many English language teachers are called upon to teach in specific occupational settings where learners need English to perform particular tasks in their work. On the next page, I have listed some specialist English dictionaries which provide useful reference material for teachers and learners of English for Specific Purposes. However, these are reference materials rather than lesson materials.

Teachers who take up posts involving the teaching of specialist occupational or academic varieties of English need to look beyond individual words and phrases.

It is perfectly reasonable for teachers preparing for ESP posts to buy reference dictionaries and word books relating to specialist areas of English. However, vocabulary represents only one level of linguistic analysis, and it is not necessarily the most useful one. When I taught English in company settings, including a steelworks in Sweden and an electronics factory in Spain, I found that my learners already knew the English words for almost all the terms relevant to their professional roles.

The challenge for learners of occupational English extends considerably beyond words and phrases

Word-level vocabulary may have been lacking in my own knowledge of these specialist fields, but it was not what my learners needed from me. What they wanted was practice in:

The structure of occupational varieties of English – using a model of linguistic analysis

Depending on the field, certain structural patterns occur more frequently in specialist varieties of English and may take on meanings different from those they usually have in general English. For example, in the sentence “This machine will print at 10 pages per minute”, the verb will expresses performance or capacity rather than future time. In this context, it has nothing to do with the future.

It can therefore be helpful to use a model of linguistic analysis – a step-by-step set of questions about what to look for – to establish:

  1. which structural forms occur most frequently within a particular variety of occupational English; and
  2. how the meanings of these forms may differ from the meanings they normally have in general English.

Significant advances in the description of special registers of English – occupational, social and academic – followed the publication of David Crystal and Derek Davy's Investigating English Style in 1969. Instead of restricting analysis to vocabulary, Crystal and Davy encouraged the investigation of special registers at every level of linguistic description.

Briefly, and without losing sight of functional criteria, these levels include:

The first step of the analysis – [1] graphetics and graphology – concerns written text and layout. If we take the language of politics or advertising as examples of specific varieties of English, fonts and typefaces may themselves contribute to the message conveyed by a company brochure or political party manifesto.

There are clearly close links between structural analysis and functional analysis. To understand why particular linguistic features occur, we need to consider what the language is being used to achieve.

Functional analysis – the best approach to teaching occupational English

My recommended starting point for teaching English for Specific Purposes is to consider the functions of the particular variety of English being taught. This may be difficult until you have become familiar with your learners and their duties, but there is now a substantial body of literature describing how particular varieties of English function.

An understanding of the functions of an occupational register makes the linguistic analysis of syntax, lexis and phonological features much more meaningful. It enables you to keep in mind why particular constructions, collocations and literary devices are being used, rather than simply identifying them as isolated linguistic features.

Teaching specialist English is therefore much more interesting than concentrating on word-level vocabulary. In any case, good vocabulary practice materials, such as those in the English Vocabulary in Use series, go beyond the role of simple reference dictionaries by identifying functional areas and providing a framework for language use.

Establish the function of the special variety of English that you are attempting to teach – your learners will already know much of the vocabulary.

Example: a functional analysis of the language of politics

Functionally, the languages of politics and advertising share a strong emphasis on judgement. Judgement is also an important feature of other professional registers, including the language of law, where people may be judged guilty or innocent, and religion, where behaviour may be judged right or wrong.

Politicians are constantly trying to give their own party a positive value and their rivals a negative one. Advertisers play a similar game with competing products. This produces several different types of claim. On the positive side, we find:

Another linguistic level of analysis is already revealing itself here: [3] syntax. The language of politicians and advertisers contains many conditional forms. Sentence length may also be shorter than in philosophical writing because people working in marketing know that an audience may switch off if a message continues for too long.

The political “sound bite” has replaced much of the more extended political oratory associated with speakers such as Michael Foot. His 1983 Political Party Election Manifesto was unkindly described as “the longest suicide note in political history”. Television advertisements similarly depend on short, memorable “sound bites”, and both politicians and advertisers have a tendency to express ideas in slogans. I doubt that this will change, despite the continuing adverse reaction to what has come to be known as “spin”.

Phonological features

Sound bites and slogans influence both the phonology and the syntax of political and advertising language. Because a sound bite needs to be memorable, lists of positive or negative qualities often contain no more than three items. The message also needs to remain in the listener's aural memory, bringing phonological features into play through:

Belief systems and appeals to assumed “common values”

Claims about achievements, promises and party or company philosophy are often accompanied by appeals to values that the speaker assumes the audience will share. These include:

The language used to illustrate these political appeals becomes particularly interesting when we move to [4] the lexical level. The lexical features of political discourse go far beyond what is normally documented in a reference dictionary of government and politics.

Lexical features

Political language and advertising are both notable for their frequent use of imagery and metaphor, as well as for an abundance of pretentious or apparently meaningful expressions. George Orwell famously described political language as “a catalogue of swindles and perversions”.

We are all familiar with vaguely defined noun phrases, often applied to states or political groups, such as “freedom, tolerance and democracy” and “a force for good in the world”. Verbal phrases can also be used to avoid expressing an idea directly. Examples include dying metaphors such as “toe the line”, “play into the hands of” and “have no axe to grind”.

Other constructions perform a similar function. These include expressions such as “give rise to”, “play a leading part in”, “make contact with” and “take effect”. Another example is the not un- construction, which can make a banal statement appear more profound.

A variation of this double negative can be found in an article entitled “Britain's role in the world”, written by Tony Blair in February 2003. Political language tends to contain particularly obvious examples of such devices when politicians are trying to defend themselves against criticism. Criticised for being George Bush's poodle, Tony Blair told Labour Party supporters: “I didn't hesitate to disagree at times, by the way, with Bill Clinton when he was President.”

An analysis of metaphor in political language can be found in Treuhaft's humorous study, An Investigation into current L (or Left-wing) Usage, which appears as a postscript to Jessica Mitford's account of her involvement with the American Communist Party in A Fine Old Conflict. The work dates from 1977, but many of the metaphors identified by Treuhaft continue to be used by politicians who would not regard themselves as communists.

Four of Treuhaft's thirteen sections, with some additional illustrations, are:

More functional analysis: product discrimination

Returning to the main function of political discourse and advertising, positive claims are needed to create “group cement”, but negative claims are equally important when the aim is to distinguish your group or product from an opponent or rival. These include:

Closely associated with product differentiation are the categories of dramatisation and individuality. These features make it possible to identify the distinctive authorship of political phrases such as “mass unemployment” [Michael Foot's description of Margaret Thatcher's government], “armed forces of the Crown”, “present, steadfast progress towards recovery” [Margaret Thatcher describing her own government's policies], or “reputation for prudence and sound economic management” [Gordon Brown describing his own stewardship].

The more distinctive the language, within reason, the greater the potential for product differentiation.

Dramatisation produces lexical items such as “watershed”, “wasteland”, “wreckers”, “extremists”, “scandal” and “obscenity”, as well as collocations such as “fateful day”, “eleventh hour” and “rigid controls”. Verb phrases can be equally rich in imagery. Examples include “accelerated into decline”, “inflamed the bitterness”, “illuminate the corridors”, “piling up new crises”, “distorted by extremes”, “bumping along the bottom”, “lurch into” [the extreme], “rob”, “blighted”, “aborting”, “dividing”, “fuelling” [hopelessness and crime], “tackling” [difficult issues], “turning our back” [on Europe], “pressing” [governments, leaders, presidents and other important people], and “taking the lead” [on the issue of weapons of mass destruction].

Conclusion

The reference dictionaries listed on the next page are what they claim to be. A dictionary of politics or of terms used in the advertising industry can certainly be useful if you work in those fields. However, to gain a real understanding of an occupational, social or academic variety of English, you need to study the functions for which it is used.

Individual vocabulary items, including collocations and phrasal verbs, represent only one level of linguistic analysis. Larger units, such as syntax and the structure of texts, require equal attention, while smaller features, such as alliteration at the level of phonetics and phonology, can make a significant contribution to meaning.

Reference dictionaries tend to be formal works, and I would like to see a dictionary of politics that did greater justice to the use of metaphor, insult and exaggeration. Most varieties of language, even legal English, contain areas where lexis is used creatively. A concordancer and a broadly representative corpus can therefore be useful tools for discovering the ways in which words are used creatively rather than simply with precision.

Lawyers for the defence and prosecution are involved in a form of product discrimination as part of their professional work. It would be a weak barrister or judge who did not know how to use a powerful image.

Bibliography

  1. Investigating English Style by David Crystal and Derek Davy

    This work provides a model which linguists have used since the late 1960s to describe special varieties of English, giving attention to phonology and syntax as well as lexis. The authors recognise the importance of functional criteria. Language courses based on notional and functional criteria became particularly influential following the publication of D. A. Wilkins' Notional Syllabuses in 1976. Crystal and Davy's model of analysis nevertheless continues to be very useful.

  2. Describing Language by David Graddol, Jenny Cheshire and Joan Swann

    The chapters of this book, which is useful across a range of social sciences, include the nature of language, the sounds of language, sentence and word structure, meaning, writing systems, face-to-face interaction, discourse and text.

  3. Waystage 1990 (pre-intermediate level) and Threshold 1990 (intermediate level) syllabus specifications by J. A. Van Ek and J. L. M. Trim, originally published by Pergamon Press in 1979/1980 and subsequently revised and corrected by Cambridge University Press.

    These are syllabus specifications produced for the Council of Europe for modern language courses at pre-intermediate and intermediate levels. The guidelines have been used by experts, including linguists at the University of Reading in Berkshire, who were called upon to help large companies and ministries of education design language curricula. The needs-analysis checklists provided in Threshold and Waystage are probably easier to work with than John Munby's much more detailed procedures.

  4. Communicative Syllabus Design: A Sociolinguistic Model for Designing the Content of Purpose-Specific Language Programmes (Cambridge University Press, 1981)

    John Munby's model, dating from the 1970s, may look like overkill, but the book is a milestone in the history of ESP teaching. It illustrates the many factors involved in situations where special varieties of language are used.

  5. Politics and the English Language and Other Essays by George Orwell

    This was my main reference for my own thesis on the language of politics. I used texts from political party election manifestos to replicate George Orwell's findings.

  6. A Fine Old Conflict by Jessica Mitford

    The appendix of this book contains an amusing section classifying imagery and metaphor used in the language of politicians, as referred to in the main discussion on this page.